Emma might be my favorite (well actually, third favorite) Jane Austen novel. I think this novel goes farthest in criticizing its main character, much farther than Northanger Abbey ever went. Emma Woodhouse is undeniably a good person, but man, is she ridiculous sometimes. I love Emma because unlike Elizabeth, she doesn’t pride herself on her intelligence or her discernment; rather, she throws herself wholly into the shallow world of High Society and owns it. Or, at least, she’d like to think she does.

So much of this novel’s narrative voice is sarcastic toward Emma. It seems like Austen is criticizing her secretly from the very first line, and it’s almost impossible for me to read this book without chuckling once every minute. I would argue that Emma is Austen’s only female anti-heroine, Catherine Morland being too naive to count. I feel like with Emma, Austen is exploring the possibility of a nicer version of Lydia Bennet, and almost apologizing for her scathing portrayal of young, flighty women of High Society. They’re not all terrible, she seems to say. Emma means well. She’s spoiled, arrogant and sort of a pretender/social climber, but she’s kind. At least she tries to be.

She’s Cher Horowitz, literally. I just can’t help but love her. So here are my favorite spoken-by Emma quotes from Austen’s much-loved novel:

These quotes more than anything exhibit Emma’s belief that she is always right and that her insight and advice is indispensable to those “less fortunate” than herself:

“You will be an old maid! and that’s so dreadful!” [Harriet]

“Never mind, Harriet, I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any body else.”

On the man who loves Harriet, the not-so-wealthy Robert Martin:

“I have no doubt that he will thrive and be a very rich man in time–and his being illiterate and coarse need not disturb us.”

Sometimes she accidentally stumbles upon profound truth, as in the case where she defends Frank Churchill:

“It is very unfair to judge of any body’s conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation. Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”

And in the case of men always expecting to be well-received after proposing marriage (Elizabeth Bennet would sympathize):

“Oh! to be sure,” cried Emma, “it is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her.”

But the best Emma quotes are the narrator’s descriptions of her! These are the ones that truly elucidate how deluded Emma can be, however good her intentions are:

“She had always wanted to do everything, and had made more progress, both in drawing and music, than many might have done with so little labour as she would ever submit to. She played and sang — and drew in almost every style; but steadiness had always been wanting; and in nothing had she approached the degree of excellence which she would have been glad to command and ought not to have failed of. She was not much deceived as to her own skill either as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.”

This quote in particular shows such sympathy for Emma’s failures and shortcomings, and allows her much room to be flawed and human. Which one of us has not wanted to appear smarter or more talented than we are? All praise Emma Woodhouse! (Or better yet, Jane Austen herself!)

So what do you think of Emma? Who’s your favorite Austen girl (or boy!)?

If I could sum up my review of Madame Bovary in six words, it would read: “holy sh*it, I loved this book.” It broke my sad little heart, and for entirely the wrong reasons, I swear. I’d like to discuss this book in terms of sympathy, the character and portrayal of Emma, and the concept of “bovarysme,” a crime of which I am entirely guilty. I hope, however, not to the same extent that Emma is. Oh, Emma. You broke my heart.

Emma Rouault is a passionate girl who believes her life should resemble the plot of a romance novel. When she marries Charles Bovary, a dull doctor who takes Emma to live in rural Normandy, Emma finds herself confined by a middle-class wife’s life and grows to hate her boring husband. Bred on the high drama of the romance novel, she believes only in romantic love. When she marries Bovary, she endeavors to “find out what precisely was meant in life by the words delight, passion, and intoxication, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.” Emma filters her experience through the novelistic tropes of stories, and when real life does not measure up, when she grows to despise her husband, she conducts love affairs with disastrous results.

First there is the grand Rodolphe Boulanger, a player if there ever was one. While he is interested only in an empty affair, Emma fancies herself in love with him and they plot to elope, even though Rodolphe has no intention of following through with the scheme. Then there is Léon, a young lawyer’s clerk helplessly besotted with her. But even this affair ends badly, as Emma becomes overbearing and controlling. Both men renounce their previous devotion to Emma. She falls deeply into debt due to her preference for luxury and finery, and ends up taking her own life by ingesting arsenic.

When reading this book, I didn’t know whether I wanted to hug Emma or throttle her, or maybe both. A country girl, Emma has been bred on dreams and the drama of the romance novel. This is the way Emma initially reminded me of Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland; both allow themselves to believe their lives resemble novels (in Catherine’s case, it’s the gothic novel) and fail to perceive reality.

Forgive this rather lengthy block quote from the last third of the novel; it so clearly explains Emma’s emotional state and her philosophy, and the prose itself is gorgeous and poetic. Really, I had the e-book version on my iPhone that was the original translation, but my physical book was the new translation by Adam Thorpe, and I do think the newer translation is much more elegant and finely worded.

She wasn’t happy, had never been so. From where did it come then–this deficiency of life, this instantaneous decay of everything she leaned upon? But, if only somewhere there were a manly and handsome being, valiant by nature, full of both high spirits and breeding, a poet’s heart in the guise of an angel, lyre strung with bronze, sounding its elegiac epithalamia to the heavens, why might she not accidentally meet him? Oh, impossible thought! Nothing, anyway, was worth the looking for; everything lied! Each smile concealed a yawn of tedium, each joy a curse, every pleasure its disgust, and the finest kisses left you nothing on the lips but the unattainable desire for a voluptuousness still more sublime. (339)

This is the emotional state that coined the term “bovarysme,” a tendency toward escapist dreaming in which one fancies herself the heroine of a novel and rejects everyday reality. The difference between Catherine and Emma lies in genre: In Northanger Abbey, a comedy, Catherine is treated with humor and light-hearted sarcasm; Emma’s story is thoroughly tragic. She believes she will only find true happiness with the next man or the next, relying on their devotion and hollow emotion to feel fulfilled. Obviously, she is constantly disappointed.

As a lover of stories and a dedicated reader of novels, I understand how it sort of becomes hardwired to perceive real-life events as simply plot points. Reading novels makes you a romantic, and it does have the tendency to separate you from reality as if by a veil. Looking for a resolution while reading a novel makes you look for that similar resolution in real life, a happily-ever-after of sorts. I’m not the only one to think like this, I’m sure, but it’s a slippery little trap. Catherine Morland escaped from this way of thinking; Emma did–and could–not.

Gustave Flaubert famously said of his main character, “Emma Bovary, c’est moi.” A man who loved romance, exotic tales, beauty, and art, Flaubert treated Emma with a deft hand of both sympathy and indictment. She’s absurd and ridiculous, incapable of true, genuine emotion, yet she is a product of her time and her environment. It’s not a crime to love art; it’s a crime to let art paint over reality. Flaubert knew this, even as he said, “Life is such a hideous business that the only way to tolerate it is to avoid it…by living in Art.” But one cannot live in art, because art is not life, and to think otherwise is to render yourself incapable of experiencing life without the obscuring veil of “art” constantly pulled over your eyes. Emma not only did not remove the veil, she never noticed it was there at all. Art and life were, for her, inseparable and indistinct.

Woven in the narrative is the concept of the ideal life, something that smacks so violently of the American dream that it left me reeling. Emma is a bourgeois wife. She aspires to the life of a lady and what she sees as the ideal mode of existence. She destroys herself and everyone else to get it. She wants the French, 19th-century equivalent of the white-picket-fence and the suburban perfection. But she can never have it–it’s always out of reach. She can never achieve the ideal. It’s chilling.

The writing itself is the reason why 19th-century literature is my favorite to read. At each finely wrought sentence and poignant turn-of-phrase I found myself mouthing “shit, shit, shit, this is gorgeous” (clearly my own thought processes are less pretty). There’s a reason why Flaubert described Madame Bovary as a poem.

The ending is ironic in the worst way. When Emma dramatically eats arsenic and dies a slow, painful death, she leaves behind four men: Rodolphe and Léon, her lovers, are indifferent; all their loving words, all their promises mean nothing anymore. Then there is her husband, Charles, who is afflicted with a grief so deep it contributes to his death. He literally wastes away, even though he discovers her infidelity. It’s ironic that Emma strove her whole life to be loved like that, to be loved by a man who could not live without her, who adored her despite her frailties and absurdities, and that this man turned out to be her husband whom she hated more than any other (except perhaps Lheureux, her debtor). Charles was Emma’s key to transporting love, social advancement, finery, and all that she desired, if only she could have been practical and level-headed enough to work within the confines of her life, instead of moving clandestinely beyond it.

Finally, there is Justin. A young assistant to the pharmacist, Justin falls desperately in love with Emma, but she never notices. One of the most heartbreaking scenes of the novel occurs after Emma’s death, when Justin lies prostrate on Emma’s grave, completely distraught over her death:

On the grave, between the pines, a child wept on his knees, and his breast, made sore with sobbing, heaved in the shadows, under the pressure of an immense regret gentler than the moon and more unfathomable than the night. (406)

Emma never notices his affection, but if she had, would never have returned it because he is not “a manly and handsome being, valiant by nature, full of both high spirits and breeding, a poet’s heart in the guise of an angel” but a low-born, rustic person. Emma’s definition of “love” proves that what she desires is not love at all, but the appearance of it. Her pursuit of love is really the pursuit of riches and a certain standard of living. Yes, she’s lonely, but she’s not self-aware enough to recognize this uncorrupted emotion. All she knows is the material, the appearance of happiness and love, not the things themselves.

The most horrible irony, the immense tragedy of the story, is that all of Emma’s lofty aspirations and her overwhelming desire to be rich and grand left her child poor and penniless, without even the possibility of the least social advancement. When Charles dies, there are “twelve francs” left to transport little Berthe to her grandmother, where she will spend her youth and probably all her life working minimum wage in a cotton mill. This is the trap of the bourgeois, of striving to be richer and more important and sacrificing your morals and those you love in order to achieve a material ideal.

Yet, it is not just Emma who acts thus. Most of the middle-class characters in this novel are just as materialistic and ambitious as Emma–but she is a woman. Many times in the novel Emma expresses the wish to be a man, to be free to move in the world as she wishes, to travel and to love like a man (read: have sex like a man). It was qualities like these that made me ache for Emma, even as I wished to slap her across the face. She’s a victim; not just a victim, but a victim nonetheless. She’s the victim and the villain, and ultimately tragic.

It’s snowing up a storm here in New York, and it’s beautiful. I hope it keeps up until Christmas–there’s nothing I love more than a white Christmas.

On Tuesday I enjoyed a snow day from work and spent the evening decorating the Christmas tree with my family, which is one of my favorite traditions and one of the best days in my Christmas season. Here’s what I wore out in the falling snow:

I really love this weird reindeer top I got from Camden Market in London. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s just a regular deer (sticking out his tongue no less), but I thought it matched well with the skirt and my Christmassy mood!

In other news, this week I’m reading Madame Bovary for the first time, and it’s awesome so far–Emma kind of reminds me of a non-ironic portrayal of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Can’t wait to read it all and share my thoughts!

Happy holidays and Merry Christmas to all those celebrating! Hope you’re celebrating the Christmas season with lots of books and creamy hot chocolate by the fire, or maybe a spiked spiced apple cider!